ROSA was scrubbing the clothes she was washing slowly.
Alone in the washroom of her mistress’ house she could hear the laughter of
women washing clothes in the public bathhouse from which she was separated by
only a thin wall. She would have liked to be there with the other women to take
part in their jokes and their laughter and their merry gossiping, but they paid
a centavo for every piece of soiled linen they brought there to wash and her
mistress wanted to save this money.

A pin she had failed to remove from a dress sank its point
deep into her fin­ger. She cried to herself in surprise and squeezed the finger
until the blood came out. She watched the bright red drop fall into the suds of
soap and looked in delight at its gradual mingling into the whiteness. Her
mistress came upon her thus and, shouting at her, startled her into busily
rubbing while she tried not to listen to the scolding words.

When her mistress left her, she fell to doing her work
slowly again, and sometimes she paused to listen to the talk in the bathhouse
behind her. A little later her mistress’ shrill voice told her to go to the
bathhouse for drinking water. Eagerly wiping her hands on her wet wrap, she
took the can from the kitchen table and went out quickly.

She was sweating at the defective town pump when strong
hands closed over hers and started to help her. The hands pressing down on hers
made her wince and she withdrew her hands hastily. The movement was greeted by
a shout of laughter from the women washing and Rosa looked at them in surprise.
The women said to each other “Rosa does not like to be touched by Sancho” and
then slapped their thighs in laughter. Rosa frowned and picked up her can.
Sancho made a move to help her but she thrust him away, and the women roared
again, saying “Because we are here, Sancho, she is ashamed.”

Rosa carried the can away, her head angrily down, and
Sancho followed her, saying “Do not be angry,” in coaxing tones. But she went
her slow way with the can.

Her mistress’ voice came to her, calling impatiently, and
she tried to hurry. When she arrived, the woman asked her what had kept her so
long, and without waiting for an answer she ranted on, saying she had heard the
women joking in the bathhouse, and she knew what had kept the girl so long. Her
anger mounting with every angry word she said, she finally swung out an arm,
and before she quite knew what she was doing, she slapped Rosa’s face.

She was sorry as soon as she realized what she had done.
She turned away, muttering still, while Rosa’s eyes filled with sudden tears.
The girl poured the water from the can into the earthen jar, a bitter lump in
her throat, and thought of what she would do to people like her mistress when
she herself, God willing, would be “rich.” Soon however, she thought of Sancho,
and the jokes the women had shouted at her. She thought of their laughter and
Sancho following her with his coaxing tones, and she smiled slowly.

Getting back to her washing, she gathered the clothes she
had to bleach, and piled them into a basin she balanced on her head. Passing
her mistress in the kitchen, she said something about going to bleach the
clothes and under her breath added an epithet. She had to cross the street to
get to the stones gathered about in a whitened circle in a neighbor’s yard
where she was wont to lay out the clothes. She passed some women hanging
clothes on a barbed-wire fence to dry. They called to her and she smiled at
them.

Some dogs chasing each other on the street, she did not
notice because the women were praising her for the whiteness of the linen in
the basin on her head. She was answering them that she hadn’t even bleached
them yet, when one of the dogs passed swiftly very close to her. Looking down,
she saw in wide alarm another dog close on the heels of the first. An
instinctive fear of animals made her want to dodge the heedlessly running
dog, and she stepped gingerly this way and that. The dog, intent on the other
it was pursuing, gave her no heed and ran right between her legs as Rosa held
on to the basin in frantic fear lest it fall and the clothes get soiled. Her
patadiong was tight in their wetness about her legs, and she fell down,
in the middle of the street. She heard the other women’s exclamations of alarm
and her first thought was for the clothes. Without getting up, she looked at
the basin and gave obscene thanks when she saw the clothes still piled secure
and undirtied. She tried to get up, hurrying lest her mistress come out and
see her thus and slap her again. Already the women were setting up a great to
do about what had happened. Some were coming to her, loudly abusing the dogs,
solicitousness on their faces. Rosa cried, “Nothing’s the matter with me.”
Still struggling to get up, she noticed that her wrap had been loosened and
had bared her breasts. She looked around wildly, sudden shame coloring her
cheeks, and raised the wrap and tied it securely around herself again.

She could stand but she found she could not walk. The women
had gone back to their drying, seeing she was up and apparently nothing the
worse for the accident. Rosa looked down at her right foot which twinged with
pain. She stooped to pick up the basin and put it on her head again. She tried
stepping on the toes of her right foot but it made her wince. She tried the
heel but that also made her bite her lip. Already her foot above the ankle was
swelling. She thought of the slap her mistress had given her for staying in the
bathhouse too long and the slap she was most certain to get now for delaying
like this. But she couldn’t walk, that was settled.

Then there came down the street a tartanilla without
any occupant except the cochero who rang his bell, but she couldn’t move
away from the middle of the street. She looked up at the driver and started
angrily to tell him that there was plenty of room at the sides of the street,
and that she couldn’t move anyway, even if there weren’t. The man jumped down
from his seat and bent down and looked at her foot. The basin was still on
Rosa’s head and he took it from her, and put it in his vehicle. Then he
squatted down and bidding Rosa put a hand on his shoulders to steady herself,
he began to touch with gentle fingers the swelling ankle, pulling at it and
massaging it. They were still in the middle of the street. Rosa looked around
to see if the women were still there to look at them but they had gone away.
There was no one but a small boy licking a candy stick, and he wasn’t paying
any attention to them. The cochero looked up at her, the sweat on his
face, saw her looking around with pain and embarrassment mingled on her face.
Then, so swiftly she found no time to protest, he closed his arms about her
knees and lifted her like a child. He carried her to his tartanilla,
plumped her down on one of the seats. Then he left her, coming back after a
short while with some coconut oil in the hollow of his palm. He rubbed the oil
on her foot, and massaged it. He was seated on the seat opposite Rosa’s and
had raised the injured foot to his thigh, letting it rest there, despite Rosa’s
protest, on his blue faded trousers. The basin of wet clothes was beside Rosa
on the seat and she fingered the clothing with fluttering hands. The
cochero asked her where she lived and she told him, pointing out the
house. He asked what had happened, and she recited the whole thing to him,
stopping with embarrassment when she remembered the loosening of her
patadiongand the nakedness of her bosom. How glad she was he had not
seen her thus. The cochero had finished with her foot, and she slid from
the seat, her basin on a hip. But he took it from her, asking her to tell him
where the bleaching stones were. He went then, and himself laid out the white
linen on the stones, knowing like a woman, which part to turn to the sun.

He came back after a while, just as Rosa heard with
frightened ears the call of her mistress. She snatched the basin from the
cochero’s hand and despite the pain caused her, limped away.

She told her mistress about the accident. The woman did not
do anything save to scold her lightly for being careless. Then she looked at
the swollen foot and asked who had put oil on it. Rosa was suddenly shy of
having to let anyone know about her cochero, so she said she had asked
for a little oil at the store and put it on her foot herself. Her mistress was
unusually tolerant, and Rosa forgot about the slapping and said to herself this
was a day full of luck!

It was with very sharp regret that she thought of her
having forgotten to ask the cochero his name. Now, in the days that
followed, she thought of him, the way he had wound an arm around her knees and
carried her like a little girl. She dreamed about the gentleness of his fingers.
She smiled remembering the way he had laid out the clothes on stones to bleach.
She knew that meant he must do his own washing. And she ached in ten­derness
over him and his need for a woman like her to do such things for him—things
like mending the straight tear she had noticed at the knee of his trousers when
her foot had rested on them; like measuring his tartanilla seat cushions
for him, and making them, and stringing them on his vehicle. She thought of the
names for men she knew and called him by it in thinking of him, ever afterwards.
In her thoughts she spoke to him and he always answered.

She found time to come out on the street for a while, every
day. Sometimes she would sweep the yard or trim the scraggly hedge of viola
bushes; or she would loiter on an errand for tomatoes or vinegar. She said to
herself, He dreams of me too, and he thinks of me. He passes here every day
wishing to see me. She never saw him pass, but she said to herself, He passes
just when I am in the house, that’s why I never see him.

Some tartanilla would pass, and if she could, as
soon as she heard the sound of the wheels, she looked out of a window, hoping
it would be Angel’s. Sometimes she would sing very loudly, if she felt her
mistress was in a good humor and not likely to object. She told herself that
if he could not see her, he would at least wish to hear her voice.

She longed no more to be part of the group about the water
tank in the bathhouse. She thought of the women there and their jokes and she
smiled, in pity, because they did not have what she had, some one by the name
of Angel, who knew how to massage injured feet back to being good for walking
and who knew how to lay out clothes for bleaching.

When they teased her about Sancho, who insisted on pumping
her can full every time she went for drinking water, she smiled at the women
and at the man, full of her hidden knowledge about someone picking her up and
being gentle with her. She was too full of this secret joy to mind their
teasing. Where before she had been openly angry and secretly pleased, now she
was indifferent. She looked at Sancho and thought him very rude beside… beside
Angel. He always put his hands over hers when she made a move to pump water. He
always spoke to her about not being angry with the women’s teasing. She thought
he was merely trying to show off. And when one day Sancho said, “Do not mind
their teasing; they would tease you more if they knew I really feel like they
say I do,” she glared at him and thought him unbearably ill-mannered. She spat
out of the corner of her mouth, letting him see the grimace of distaste she
made when she did so, and seeing Sancho’s disturbed face, she thought, If Angel
knew, he’d strike you a big blow. But she was silent and proud and unsmiling.
Sancho looked after her with the heavy can of water held by one hand, the other
hand flung out to balance herself against the weight. He waited for her to turn
and smile at him as she sometimes did, but she simply went her way. He flung
his head up and then laughed snortingly.

Rosa’s mistress made her usual bad-humored sallies against
her fancied slowness. Noticing Rosa’s sudden excursions into the street, she
made remarks and asked curious questions. Always the girl had an excuse and her
mistress soon made no further questions. And unless she was in bad temper, she
was amused at her servant’s attempts at singing.

One night she sent the maid to a store for wine. Rosa came
back with a broken bottle empty of all its contents. Sudden anger at the waste
and the loss made her strike out with closed fists, not caring where her blows
landed until the girl was in tears. It often touched her when she saw Rosa crying
and cowering, but now the woman was too angry to pity.

It never occurred to Rosa that she could herself strike out
and return every blow. Her mistress was thirtyish, with peaked face and thin
frame, and Rosa’s strong arms, used to pounding clothes and carrying water,
could easily have done her hurt. But Rosa merely cried and cried, saying now
and then Aruy! Aruy!, until the woman, exhausted by her own anger left
off striking the girl to sit down in a chair, curse loudly about the loss of
such good wine, and ask where she was going to get the money to buy another bottle.

Rosa folded her clothes into a neat bundle, wrapped them in
her blanket, and getting out her slippers, thrust her feet into them. She crept
out of a door without her mistress seeing her and told herself she’d never come
back to that house again.

It would have been useless to tell her mistress how the
bottle had been broken, and the wine spilled. She had been walking alone in the
street hurrying to the wine store, and Sancho had met her. They had talked; he
begging her to let him walk with her and she saying her mistress would be angry
if she saw. Sancho had insisted and they had gone to the store and bought the
wine, and then going home, her foot had struck a sharp stone. She had bent to hold
a foot up, looking at the sole to see if the stone had made it bleed. Her dress
had a wide, deep neck, and it must have hung away from her body when she bent.
Anyway, she had looked up to find Sancho looking into the neck of her dress.
His eyes were turned hastily away as soon as she straightened up, and she
thought she could do nothing but hold her peace. But after a short distance in
their resumed walk home, he had stopped to pick up a long twig lying on the
ground. With deft strokes he had drawn twin sharp peaks on the ground. They
looked merely like the zigzags one does draw playfully with any stick, but
Rosa, having seen him looking into her dress while she bent over, now became so
angry that she swung out and with all her force struck him on the check with
her open palm. He reeled from the unexpected blow, and quickly steadied himself
while Rosa shot name after name at him. Anger rose in his face. It was nearly
dark, and there was no one else on the street. He laughed, short angry
laughter, and called her back name for name. Rosa approached him and made to
slap him again, but Sancho was too quick for her. He had slipped out of her way
and himself slapped her instead. The surprise of it angered her into sudden
tears. She swung up the bottle of wine she had held tightly in one hand, and
ran after the man to strike him with it. Sancho slapped her arm so hard that
she dropped the bottle. The man had run away laughing, calling back a final
undeserved name at her, leaving her to look with tears at the wine seeping into
the ground. Some people had come toward her then, asking what had happened. She
had stooped, picked up the biggest piece of glass, and hurried back to her
mistress, wondering whether she would be believed and forgiven.

Rosa walked down street after street. She had long ago
wiped the tears from her face, and her thoughts were of a place to sleep, for
it was late at night. She told herself she would kill Sancho if she ever saw
him again. She picked up a stone from the road, saying, I wish a cold wind
would strike him dead, and so on; and the stone she grasped tightly, say­ing,
If I meet him now, I would throw this at him, and aim so well that I would
surely hit him.

She rubbed her arm in memory of the numbing blow the man
had dealt it, and touched her face with furious shame for the slap he had dared
to give her. Her fists closed more tightly about the stone and she looked about
her as if she expected Sancho to appear.

She thought of her mistress. She had been almost a year in
the woman’s employ. Usually she stayed in a place, at the most, for four
months. Sometimes it was the master’s smirking ways and evil eyes, sometimes it
was the children’s bullying demands. She had stayed with this last mistress
because in spite of her spells of bad humor, there were periods afterward when
she would be generous with money for a dress, or for a cine with other maids.
And they had been alone, the two of them. Sometimes the mistress would get so
drunk that she would slobber into her drink and mumble of persons that must
have died. When she was helpless she might perhaps have starved if Rosa had not
forcibly fed her. Now, however, thought of the fierce beating the woman had
given her made Rosa cry a little and repeat her vow that she would never step
into the house again.

Then she thought of Angel, the cochero who had been
gentle, and she lost her tears in thinking how he would never have done what
Sancho did. If he knew what had happened to her, he would come running now and
take her to his own home, and she would not have to worry about a place to
sleep this night. She wandered about, not stopping at those places where she
knew she would be accepted if she tried, her mind full of the injustices she
had received and of comparisons between Sancho and Angel. She paused every time
a tartanilla came her way, peering intently into the face of the
cochero, hoping it would be he, ready to break her face into smiles if
it were indeed. She carried her bundle on her arm all this while, now
clenching a fist about the stone she still had not dropped and gnashing her
teeth.

She had been walking about for quite a while, feeling not
very tired, having no urgent need to hurry about finding herself a place, so
sharp her hopes were of somehow seeing her cochero on the streets. That
was all she cared about, that she must walk into whatever street she came to,
because only in that way would he see her and learn what they had done to her.

Then, turning into a street full of stores set side by
side, she felt the swish of a horse almost brushing against her. She looked up
angrily at the cochero’s laughing remark about his whip missing her
beautiful bust. An offense like that, so soon after all her grief at what
Sancho had done, inflamed her into passionate anger, and mouthing a quick
curse, she flung the stone in her hand at the cochero on his seat. It
was rather dark and she did not quite see his face. But apparently she hit
something, for he suddenly yelled a stop at the horse, clambered down, and ran
back to her, demanding the reason for her throwing the stone. She exclaimed
hotly at his offense with the whip, and then looking up into his face, she
gasped. She gasped and said, “Angel!”

For it was he. He was wearing a striped shirt, like so many
other people were wearing, and he had on the very same trousers of dark blue he
had worn when he massaged her foot. But he gazed at her in nothing but anger,
asking whether her body was so precious that she would kill his horse. Also,
why did she keep saying Angel; that was not his name!

Rosa kept looking up at him not hearing a word of his
threats about taking her to the municipio, saying only Angel, Angel, in
spite of his protests that that was not his name. At last she understood that
the cochero did not even remember her and she realized how empty her
thoughts of him now were. Even his name was not Angel. She turned suddenly to
walk away from him, saying, “You do not even remember me.”

The cochero peered at her face and exclaimed after
a while, “Oh yes! the girl with the swollen foot!” Rosa forgot all the
emptiness, forgot the sudden sinking of her heart when she had realized that
even he would flick his whip at a girl alone on the road, and lifted her
smiling face at him, stopping suddenly to tell him her foot had healed very
quickly. The cochero asked her after a while where she was going, and
she said breathlessly, without knowing just why she answered so, “I am going
home!” He asked no questions about where she had been, why she was so late. He
bade her ride in his vehicle, grandly saying he would not make her pay, and
then, with many a loud exclamation to his horse, he drove her to her mistress’
house.

Rosa didn’t tell him what had happened. Nor anything about
her dreams. She merely answered the questions the cochero asked her
about how she had been. “With the grace of God, all right, thank you.” Once he
made her a sly joke about his knowing there were simply lots of men courting
her. Rosa laughed breathlessly and denied it. She wished they would never
arrive, but they soon did. The cochero waited for her to get out, and
then drove off, saying “Don’t mention it” to her many thanks. She ran after
the tartanilla when it had gone off a little way, and asked, running
beside the moving vehicle, looking up into his face, “What is your name?”

The cochero shouted, without stopping his horse,
“Pedro” and continued to drive away.

Rosa went into the house without hesitation, forgetting all
her vows about never stepping into it again and wondering why it was so still.
She turned on the lights and found her mistress sleeping at a table with her
head cradled in her arms, a new wine bottle before her, empty now of all its
contents. With an arm about the thin woman’s waist, she half dragged her into
her bed. When the woman would wake, she would say nothing, remembering nothing.
Rosa turned on the light in the kitchen and hummed her preparations for a meal.
Ω

This 1937 classic always makes it to everyone’s list of outstanding 20th century Philippine stories.